Of all the art museums that run along the south coast of England, from the Box in Plymouth to the Towner in Eastbourne, Bexhill-on-Sea’s De La Warr Pavilion and Turner Contemporary in Margate, only two are attached to universities. Both are comparatively young. One is the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Brighton, of which horrifying news in a moment. The other is John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.
Once housed on the campus, and since 2018 in a building across a gleaming central square from Southampton City Art Gallery, JHG has already presented a terrific roster of names: Gerhard Richter, Derek Jarman, Lindsay Seers, Turner prize winner Helen Cammock. It is now offering the renowned Malawi-born artist Billie Zangewa, who hand-stitches her collages out of silk, and a striking two-film exhibition set in Nigeria by the London-based Ayo Akingbade, who is not yet 30.
The Fist (2022) follows a working day in a 1960s-built factory 60s factory 20 miles from Lagos. The first Guinness brewery built outside the British Isles, it was designed as a modernist icon. But Akingbade, tellingly, does not linger on the exterior, her camera focusing instead on the strange life inside.
Workers sign in, incredibly slowly because the form is too long (one anxiously checks his watch, queueing behind another). Conveyor belts begin to thrum. Morning prayers are held in front of gargantuan machines: the last time you will actually hear human voices.
Battalions of brown bottles rattle away to the far horizon. Crates circle round and round in industrial carousels. Walls of cans rise like monumental cliffs. The camera widens to show the workers tiny against the equipment, or passing along walkways like ghosts. Do Not Drink, warns a sign.
No food or drink is ever visible. Lunchtime involves plastic bags. The separation between people and regimented capitalist order grows ever more apparent. The Super 16mm film occasionally flashes and flares, as if rising up against what it shows. This is a very subtle tension between contemporary documentary and quasi-abstract modernist film.
You watch The Fist – is the title a reference to solidarity, or oppression? – on one side of an industrial partition. On the other is a much shorter film, Faluyi (2022), that nevertheless reverses the proposition by showing a life in one day. It follows a schoolgirl, Ife, coming of age with the terrible news of her father’s sudden death in the beautiful hills of Idanre in southwestern Nigeria.
Myth and mysticism, messages woven into tablecloths and songs sung by kindergarten children, a visit to a fortune teller, ceremonial singing and ecstatic dancing on the top of hill: everything fleets by without explanation, but with a fascinating picaresque grace. And a silver dress, rapidly seen on a sewing machine at the start, reappears at the end, worn by Ife as she disappears into the dusk on the back of a motorbike. The future is good, at least on this side of the partition, and in this irreducibly mysterious film.
Fabric is not just Billie Zangewa’s medium, but in some senses her message. Born in 1973 to a mother who worked with textiles, and now based in Johannesburg, Zangewa has been stitching tiny fragments of off-cut silk into collaged scenes for many years. Some are botanical: the lush green landscapes of her childhood in Botswana; others are domestic or familial (her young son asleep, tenderly portrayed by his watchful mother). All are political in the sense that they elevate the place of Black women in the world.
Just as one pores over a painting, the manner in which it is made as well as what is depicted, so Zangewa’s art entices mind and eye. Her stitches are barely perceptible, her scissored fragments perpetually surprising: water and air shining in the radiance of distinctive silks, faces rendered complex in their every expressive nuance. It is almost impossible to see how she manages to represent a checked shirt as seen through a beer glass.
In one sardonic piece, a rich woman is at a fitting for a Dior dress. The tailor is male. Her costume is uniform, constricting, the exact opposite of what you are looking at – which is a vision of fluttering silk ingeniously imagined, and very freely worked.
Zangewa’s art has moved about 60 miles along the south coast from its showing at Brighton’s Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) last month. It followed exhibitions at CCA by the design collective Resolve and the great American painter Bill Lynch – one of the momentous events of 2022 – more or less single-handedly rediscovered in this country by CCA’s director, Ben Roberts.
Now CCA has been summarily axed by the University of Brighton. They can’t close the space, because it was only ever a frugal adaptation of an existing property. The staff costs were meagre, three people mounting museum-class shows since 2019. Yet the university has just spent £17m acquiring a gym on its campus for redevelopment, and speaks of focusing instead on its “core business”, as if education was a matter of commerce.
The decision is disgraceful, and outrageous from a university that still maintains a school of art (and still boasts about the gallery on its website). Do students no longer matter, or citizens, art, or indeed artists (Helen Cammock’s forthcoming show has been cancelled)? What we see of art by chance or design, at leisure or in passing, goes to our knowledge and experience of human existence. Why should not future generations have these experiences too? Reason not the need.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ayo Akingbade ★★★★
Billie Zangewa ★★★★
Ayo Akingbade: Show Me the World Mister and Billie Zangewa: A Quiet Fire are at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, until 9 September; Billie Zangewa: A Quiet Fire transfers to Glasgow’s Tramway, 1 October to 28 January 2024
• This article was amended on 12 June 2023. The De La Warr Pavilion is in Bexhill-on-Sea, not in nearby Hastings as an earlier version said.
